Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 17.pdf/158

 THE TUCKER TRIAL

THE TUCKER TRIAL BY HUGH BANCROFT WHILE murder is always shocking, rarely has New England been more startled than by the murder of Miss Mabel Page. A highly respected woman, without an enemy in the world, was stricken down and stabbed again and again in her own home on a highway in a suburban village in the middle of the day by an assassin who came and went unseen. The story, as disclosed by the evidence, of the tragedy and of the incidents that led to the detec tion, apprehension and trial of the sus pected murderer, rivals the extraordinary creations of the mind of Conan Doyle. The Page family was well-known and respected in Boston and vicinity. Edward Page, the father of the murdered woman, was for merly a very prosperous, not to say wealthy, business man, but in his declining years met with severe reverses. He was obliged to give up his residence on the Back Bay in Boston and removed to his summer home in Weston, a pretty rural town a dozen miles from Boston. The home was on South Avenue, one mile from the stone bridge over the Charles River, which there forms the boundary between Weston and that part of Newton known as Auburndale. Mr. Page, who at the time of the murder was seventy-eight years old, usually went to Boston daily to attend to what little business there was left to him. The other members of the family were his son Harold and daughter Mabel, and a single servant, Amy Roberts. Harold Page was about thirty-five, a Harvard graduate, and em ployed as a clerk at the South Terminal station in Boston. Amy Roberts had been in the Page household for six years and was regarded almost as a member of the family rather than as a servant. Mabel Page, the murdered woman, was forty-one years old. Her life in Weston had been quiet and re tired, devoted to her father and brother and a small circle of intimate friends.

On March 31, 1904, Harold Page went to Boston early in the morning as usual. The father went to Auburndale a little later. Amy Roberts left the house at half-past ten to spend the day in Cambridge and Boston, leaving Miss Page alone. The father, re turning home early, found the dead body of his daughter lying on the floor of her bed room in the second story of the house, at about half-past two in the afternoon. She had on her hat and was completely dressed to go out except her overskirt. That was discovered later in a heap behind a door in a corner of the room, full of fibers of the straw matting which formed the carpeting of the chamber, and with the hooks and eyes of the placket torn off. Nothing in the house was out of place or in any way disarranged except the rug outside of the door to her room. The local physician was sent for. He ob served a horrible jagged wound in the neck, of the type frequently found in suicides. Without further examination he telephoned to the medical examiner that there was a case of probable suicide requiring his atten tion. The medical examiner arrived that even ing, and found that there were two wounds in the neck and several cuts on the hands. He concluded to wait until daylight to per form an autopsy, and seemed, upon his first observation, to have regarded the case as one of suicide, although he was much mys tified at the failure to find any weapon. When the undertaker was caring for the body late that night, he discovered for the first time that there was a deep wound in the back, eliminating any possibility of sui cide. At the autopsy the following morning still another wound was found, this one in the chest and penetrating through the heart. Aside from the knife wounds there was no other indication of violence on the body. As a result of this first impression that it